Proxy Adoptions

The dangers of proxy adoption: According
to an official of the International Social Service, this woman
from Texas “appeared to be drunk and she appeared to be
over 50 years of age” when she first greeted the baby adopted
for her, by proxy, in Greece, 1957.

During the 1950s, proxy adoptions
were the most widely publicized means of international
adoption. They allowed U.S. citizens to adopt in foreign courts
by designating a proxy agent to act in their place. Thousands of
children, especially from Japan, Greece, and Korea, were adopted
in this way. Because these adoptees entered the United States as
the legal children of parents who had never met them, proxies avoided
the requirements of state laws and flouted the notion that child
welfare was the dominant factor in adoption.

Proxy adoptions revealed how inadequate federal policy was in
dealing with family-making across national borders. Until passage
of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1961, which incorporated
international adoption,
the migration of foreign-born children to the U.S. had no place
in permanent law. It was governed by a series of provisional refugee
and displaced persons acts, beginning with a directive from President
Truman in December 1945, that envisioned the entry of “eligible
orphans” from war-torn countries as a temporary emergency
and set quotas for that purpose. National concerns about immigration
and unwillingness to interfere in the legal systems of sovereign
nations meant that international
adoptions were effectively exempted from the regulatory regime
that had been laboriously put into place domestically.

Proxy adoptions epitomized the problem, as professionals saw it,
that foreign children were given unequal legal protection and accorded
few if any safeguards. Officials in the U.S
Children’s Bureau, the Child
Welfare Leargue of America, and the American Branch of International
Social Service charged proxy peddlers, including Bertha
and Harry Holt, with masterminding an unscrupulous, global mail-order
baby racket and hiding behind humanitarian rhetoric. Transnational
migrants needed the minimum standards
mandated in most domestic adoptions: investigation, supervision,
and probation. Professionals pointed to additional hazards in international
adoption. Many foreign children—from Asia in particular—had
spent lengthy periods in orphanages and needed special attention
as a result. Professionals also claimed to possess crucial cultural
awareness that amateurs lacked. They suggested that parents adopting
foreign children needed basic education about children’s home
countries, rudimentary language skills, and enlightened attitudes
about a host of things from food and sleeping arrangements to neighborhood
integration and interracial dating and marriage.

Proxy adoptions ignored all of this and left family-making up
to faith and chance.